Isabelle Faust & Nicholas Phan
Gramophone Award Winners – Isabelle Faust & Nicholas Phan
Congratulations to Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2026 Artist of the Year and Concerto winner Isabelle Faust and Opera winner Nicholas Phan! The winners were selected from a shortlist of 66 recordings (six in each of the 11 recording categories).
Isabelle Faust
ARTIST OF THE YEAR
“Bach duo-playing of ‘exemplary engagement and purring quality’; a stunningly dramatic Ligeti Violin Concerto climaxing on a cadenza of ‘dazzling desperation’; a Telemann programme played with ‘all the finesse, colour and flamboyant theatricality [his] cosmopolitan music demands’: three quotes from three different Gramophone critics’ reviews of three separate 2025 albums starring Isabelle Faust – all three of which turned up on the 2026 Gramophone Awards shortlist, her Ligeti alongside Les Siècles and François-Xavier Roth ultimately scooping the overall Concerto Award. With all that considered, to say – even in the context of the fact that Faust rarely doesn’t end up at least shortlisted for a Gramophone Award – that she has both had a prolific year for new releases and cut a serious dash with them in these pages is to understate things by a country mile.” Read more.
CONCERTO
Ligeti · Kurtág
Kurtág Aus der Ferne – III; V
Ligeti Concert Românesc. Piano Concerto. Violin Concerto
Isabelle Faust, Martial Gauthier vn Carole Roth va Robin Michael vc Jean-Frédéric Neuburger pf Les Siècles / François-Xavier Roth
Harmonia Mundi
“However, the award belongs above all to Isabelle Faust. We expect uncanny precision and agility from her, though the Violin Concerto’s opening from nowhere still defies explanation as a feat of coordination. Anyone on the wavelength of her Mozart and Brahms recordings should appreciate the classical poise and inward feeling of the following ‘Aria’, coloured with myriad shades of vibrato.”
OPERA
Saariaho Adriana Mater
Fleur Barron, Axelle Fanyo, Christopher Purves bar Tsargo
San Francisco Symphony Chorus and Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
Deutsche Grammophon
“Saariaho’s opera deserves to be taken seriously because it is, for all its occasional longueurs, strangely compelling in its grimly unfolding but hypnotic tale of a brutalised father’s sins, and the journey to discover where forgiveness sits.”